Questions and postings pertaining to the development of ImageMagick, feature enhancements, and ImageMagick internals. ImageMagick source code and algorithms are discussed here. Usage questions which are too arcane for the normal user list should also be posted here.

The Linux distribution Fedora has made an upgrade to ImageMagick version 7. In this process we uncovered a few things.

Most software will not compile without patching the build scripts

Some software requires porting on top of patching the build scripts

Most upstreams don't care about version 7

These issues have caused us (those at work building Fedora) to question if we even need version 7 at all because version 6 is still being maintained. We are considering removing version 7 and continuing to ship only version 6.

We recommend you stay with ImageMagick version 6 for legacy support for a few more years. This will give legacy applications more time to upgrade to version 7. ImageMagick 6 will continue to be maintained for another 9+ years but consider that any new enhancements will be pushed to ImageMagick version 7. Instead we recommend you include a separate distribution for ImageMagick version 7. This is no different than Fedora supporting Python 2.7 and 3.6. Both ImageMagick version 6 & 7 should be able to co-exist, particularly since the ImageMagick 7 command-line utility is called magick which does not conflict with version 6 utilities, convert, composite, etc. We also add versions to the path so the install will include /etc/include/ImageMagick-6 and /etc/include/ImageMagick-7, for example, to make co-existing possible. If you only have time to fuss with one release, use ImageMagick 6.